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Narrative techniques Bergson changed the conception of the time distinguishing conventional (external) time from inner (internal) time. —> breakdown of time divisions: instead of accepted and clearly distinct ideas of past, present and future, philosophers began to conceive of time as a continuous flux. ! William James confirmed Bergson’s theory stating that conventional time is a sequence of separate points of psychological activity, while inner time is the continuous flowing, the stream of our mental activity. Traditional novels dealt with the rational and communicable area of out thoughts, but the “stream-ofconsciousness-technique” wants to reach that mental area which is the incommunicable part. The stream of consciousness is so-called because it tries to reproduce the continuous flow of human thought. It describes the Modernists’ peculiar and difficult style, which puts together distant and incongruous ideas and images, presented with no rational order. Our mental process could be divided into two parts: the rational part, which may be communicated through speech or writing, and that continuous, fluent “stream”, which is very hard to communicate. This technique varies from one writer to another and is also called “interior monologue”.! The interior monologue is the instrument used to translate the activity Ito words. It may be direct or indirect:! • The direct interior monologue doesn’t use connecting links, it has no apparent logical order or it’s difficult for the reader to follow the character’s thought. Punctuation has been abandoned and the syntax is often so obscure that the reader is at a loss to try and follow the casual inter-relation M’s between the rambling waves of the stream of consciousness. (James Joyce) ! • The indirect interior monologue is introduced by rational links and the reader is able to follow this fluent mental activity, since the author still respects the grammar, syntax and punctuation, and puts rational links through the association of ideas. (Virginia Woolf) !

The modernist revolution and the first generation of Modernists During the late 1910s and the early 1920s the English novel was greatly changed by the modernist movement in the arts and literature. The great writers reflected the novelists’ lack of faith in traditional values, the trauma of World War I, the disillusion about modern myths such as progress, science and technology. To compensate for this, sometimes classical myths were freely incorporated into modern narrative. ! The greatest novelists of the first generation Modernists were James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. The Irish background of Joyce went into his first work: Dubliners (1914), a collection of fifteen short stories about people living in Dublin. The central theme is “paralysis” that is the inability to overcome the stifling mental frustration. He gained a reputation as one of the greatest modernist writers when Ulysses, his masterpiece, came out in 1922. Its structure is based on Homer’s Odyssey: the novel describes the events of an ordinary day life of an ordinary man, Leopold Bloom. Joyce uses the epic model to stress the lack of heroism, of ideals, or love and trust in the modern world. ! Virginia Woolf was born in London and her house became a centre for the famous Bloomsbury Group. In her critical essay Modern Fiction (1919) she said that human perception depends not on measurable time (“time of the clock”) but on the way the mind is affected by it (“time of the mind”)....